Jacinda Ardern: The Woman’s Weekly Prime Minister

By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Incite 23/5/19]

Most people like the traits of self-confidence, tolerance and a fair mind. But when a prime minister consistently styles her public life and messaging in the fashion of a woman’s weekly magazine, one is left thinking how shameful it is that these traits are not being employed to serve worthier causes than meaningless emotional ejaculations.

Jacinda Ardern has perfected a modern “emoji" style of communication, one of self-confidence in her optimistic entitlement to respect (whether it has been earned or not) and an almost narcissistic preoccupation with projecting a self-image of tolerance and cutesy-pie niceness. This style of hers is unsurprising considering she was born into the earliest cohort of the Millennial generation (1980 – 1996).

As soon as Ardern became PM, press focus throughout the first year of her administration was entirely centred on her pregnancy and the birth of her baby daughter.  For the folks who like to chime-in that women in leadership are held to a more strenuous standard of judgment than men are, the national and world-wide tabloid focus on Ardern’s pregnancy clearly told a different story.  Nobody held her accountable for anything political. She was given a big, fat, free-pass on absolutely everything, because she was in a family way – and women’s magazines just couldn’t get enough of that.

Ardern has focused on grabbing depthless headlines with matching photo ops, from her early campaign slogans of ‘Let’s do this!’ and ‘Relentless posidivvidy,’ to her repetitious slogan ‘They are us’ after the Christchurch massacre – with accompanying photographs of herself and other female useful idiots swaddled in headscarves.

On the tail of that horrible massacre and on the very same day that Ardern announced the government was about to enact gun legislation outlawing all “military styled” guns (whatever they are), Ardern’s de-facto partner Mr. Stay-at-Home-Dad, Clarke Gayford, obviously with his girlfriend’s permission, hit social media with this doozy:
 
“For her 9 month birthday today we received the gift of crawling,” he posted on Twitter on Thursday night. “While her mum got her the gift of having a safer country to grow up in.”

Exactly how this country will ever be safer when only criminals and gang-members possess the illegal guns is never explained, and the press never ask.

Then we were bombarded by all the revolting gibberish associated with Ardern crumpling her mug into the most unimpeachably sincere facial expressions as she started to talk about limiting freedom of speech in New Zealand while saying things like: 

“This is an area where we need to be really cautious about balancing freedom of speech, but also where that speech tips over into a space where it becomes potentially violent and harmful.”

“Space.” As if we’re talking about something as apolitical as architecture or real estate. Then note the highly typical Freedom of Speech Denier’s predictable “but”  - and what on Earth defines “potentially violent and harmful?” A cartoon about Mohammad?  A piece of satire which sets off a minority’s touchy feelings? Using the words: “a minority’s touchy feelings?”

We’ve now witnessed the curious spectacle of the Christchurch Call, with Ardern flying off to Paris to have a virtue-signalling tête-à-tête with Emmanuel Macron at the very same time that he has tens-of-thousands of yellow-vest protesters in French streets every weekend, who are seriously calling for his removal as president.  Macron gave orders for his heavily armed police to crack down on these protests so forcefully that one of the main leaders of the movement (and it is a movement), Jerome Rodrigues, was shot by police through the eye resulting in his becoming handicapped for life.  He has since been placed in an artificial coma, to the enormous grief of his family members.

Nonetheless, our PM and Macron are busy playing nice grownups by trying to lead the world in having giant tech companies and governments voluntarily cozy-up with each other to end “terrorism and violent extremism” online.  But what about violent extremism in the flesh, Mr. Macron, and on your watch under your orders? 

It doesn’t quite strike the right glossy mag tone, does it…and while we’re on the topic of glossy mags, I guess we’ll know when Ardern and Macron have garnered a measure of success when the highly-polished Dabiq magazine, the online tool that ISIS uses to recruit foreign fighters in Western countries, is no longer available for free download.  If Ardern and Macron were serious about curing the world of terrorism and violent extremism, they would be pushing for the deportation of any Muslim with jihadist tendencies or connections into the deserts of Syria.  Same goes for the likes of imams who preach the most vile hate and violence against “infidels” in Western mosques every week. I haven’t heard Ardern or Macron even mention these very widespread and well-documented phenomena.  And they won’t.

While Ardern faffs about at this high-profile, do-gooder event, it is worth considering that in an act that can only be described as Orwellian, she had chief censor David Shanks ban the manifesto shared online by Christchurch shooter, Brenton Tarrant, upon pain of incarceration if anyone shares it or keeps a copy in their possession.

The communist China-loving, eco-fascist Tarrant stated that he chose firearms because of the influence it would have on social discourse, believing that the gun legislation debate would become global in nature and crystallise in the United States.  I surmise that he was right about that because I recently watched Ardern sit down with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and say, “Australia experienced a massacre and changed their laws. New Zealand had its experience and changed its laws. To be honest, I do not understand the United States.”  

No, it is clear that she doesn’t understand the United States, rabid socialists don’t get capitalism and freedom. 

What worries me most is that the warped mind of Tarrant understood that our woman’s weekly prime minister is so entirely predictable that she would set about turning a democracy against itself immediately after his heinous crime.  Ardern quickly began acting out his predictions. Perhaps that has something to do with why she made sure his manifesto was swiftly forbidden to be read by New Zealand citizens.

Ardern brazenly lied in that interview with Amanpour.  She claimed the altering of our gun laws was something “New Zealanders by-and-large absolutely agreed with.”

This is false.
 
New Zealanders were given absolutely no choice in the matter and a great many people, including non-gun owners, are fuming about it.  They are also incandescent with anger about the looming clamp-down on freedom of speech that Ardern and her coalition are aggressively gunning for. These infuriated feelings will not be placated by superficial appeals to women’s mag niceness, for it is only too obvious that such appeals are designed to mask Orwellian acts of crimes against liberty.

Jacinda Ardern’s leadership has become a glaring example of style over substance, manners over meaning and regularity over quality of content. I’ve seen this spectre before during the reign of Barrack Obama, this media fawning and rainbows over the Whitehouse with saccharine sprinkles – all disguising some pretty dark deeds.

As with Tarrant’s banned manifesto, along with President Macron’s under-reported, violent crack-downs on the yellow-vest protests, now into their sixth month, the seriousness of what is really going on in real-time is a far cry away from the fizzy pop bubbles of a fanzine. But why would Ardern care too much about the sombre gravity of these matters when she and Gayford are about to hog world media attention as they plan their big wedding day?

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​ ​​​​​

​